Instead Mozilla has made the curious decision to pull the plug on the long-delayed project, while offering only small clues as to why the decision was made.

The announcement was posted by Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg on the Bugzilla development page. He ordered Mozilla employees and community developers:

Please stop building windows 64 builds and tests.

As for why the he opted to pull the plug on 64-bit for now, he comments, "Many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions. The plugins that are available don’t work correctly in Firefox because we haven’t implemented things like windowproc hooking, which means that hangs are more common."

Firefox 64-bit development is dead for now. [Image Source: Flickr/dimnikolov]

Usually this is the result of a free plugin which does not properly clean up after itself.

In any event, if leaving a page open for 1 hour results in the use of more RAM you will probably benefit from finding the plugin which is leaking (Adobe or otherwise) and disable it.

Note: some change in memory usage is normal, like if ads are updated every 15 minutes, or you are watching a video. Simple, static pages should not have these issues, so if you are sitting at Google's home page and the memory usage keeps climbing then you have a problem which should be fixed.

It would seem that your choice of add-ons is rather the question, isn't it.

As of Tuesday when I restarted the computer due to windows updates, I have had an average of over 20 to 30 tabs open at any one time on Firefox Nightly 19.0a1 with about 12 add-ons running. It is using around 500MB right now with 22 tabs open, ranging from heavy flash to plain HTML. So, excuse me if I don't agree with your opinion, I've yet to see a session getting close to what you describe (1GB) in the recent past.

Since I've been running (Minefield) Nightly almost exclusively since the flash support arrived, I had only one instance when it neared the 1GB (890MB with 14 tabs open) mark and it was in the early days of (flaky) 64bit flash development.

The preference of Firefox Nightly usage on a daily basis compared other browsers haven't precluded me from initiating others sessions in IE9 64bit, but it takes me longer to accomplish the same task in it. Chrome becomes wobbly (unresponsive/crashing) with 10 to 12 tabs open and uses more resources than Nightly with twice the amount of tabs open.

But you're not getting my point, that I'd MUCH rather pay money to increase memory in the system than do without the FF add-ons, they are central to my use of that particular system and at this point I'd just stay off the internet before I'd surf what are today sites so obnoxious that it is intolerable without some add-ons and I don't mean only the two most popular nor that it has anything to do with broadband bandwidth, I just despise some of the asshole ideas put out there these days.

Adobe plugins do generally suck, with their closed proprietaryness that nobody but Adobe can fix.

But quite frankly, when today you can buy 16 GB of RAM for under $60, is a few hundred megabytes of utilization really that much of a concern? I agree that code efficiency has plummeted in recent years, but with tens of GB of memory in consumer desktop PC's, I can see how nobody cares.